Jesus christ this match
There are some extremely serious allegations against one of the co-founders of EVO. Someone named Joey Cuellar. The event was already going online this year due to COVID. Now, because of this, many of the top competitors and also companies are pulling out of the online event.
Could be the end of EVO altogether. The good part of the fighting game community is going to need to really make a big regroup and reform if it wants to come back from all this.
It has been a wild fucking 24/48 hours for fighting games, multiple allegations of underage sexual abuse from the Smash Bros. community and a bunch of other bullshit across multiple scenes. I think the whole of the FGC is going to be in for a big cleaning of the house this summer. Shit for the first time in like 20 years EVO is canceled.
There are a lot of mixed feelings for me now thinking back on that MAGfest panel I did with how much I praised my experience in the community.
So, now Cuellar has been kicked out from EVO team and replaced and EVO 2020 has been totally canceled.
Iâm hoping that the event can bounce back come next year. For casual fighting game viewer itâs useful event. Multiple games, big enough that I wonât miss it happening and mixed with high level play there are exciting publisher announcements for new characters, updates and even games.
Iâm just going to link to the Final of the OWL Summer Showdown because the Youtube image is a spoiler to who is in it, but the match itself was excellent.
Paris was standout the whole tournament.
The reddit megathread is massive at the moment. I heard about this then forgot about it till it was mentioned in another thread on an entirely different topic. I also knew of a guy who was a registered sex offender, was really big on the smash community, posted some weird 40 minute verbal rant on soundcloud about all this stuff, and has deleted his twitter account.
I was occupied this weekend so I am only now catching up with OWL matches. It included a match between the best team in the league and the worst team in the league, and it the best team decided to just let their backup main tank play Genji and it was still an absolute dumpstering.
Yeah⌠Iâd say that is more a result of Shock being REALLY good, rather than Colourhex being bad. The Boston Uprising have been consistently screwed by their org. They constantly bring new people in and sell off their good players to other orgs. It has ended up in a situation where there is no team cohesion for the Uprising. Compared to the well-oiled machine of Shock, it just isnât a contest.
Lack of parity is a huge problem for eSports in general. The only pro team sport that comes close is the NBA. No surprise because basketball is the most low-luck high skill-cap pro team sport, and most eSport video games are as well. If I ran an eSports league I would definitely deploy every mechanism to level the playing field and have more competitive teams. The usual mechanism of having skill-based matchmaking doesnât work in a pro league. Every team has to play every team.
For all you folks that enjoy an evenly matched battle, I hope you didnât pay for the match at the Stadium. But for all of you who like the occasional one-sided masochistic pouncing, then watch out for the Shock
That match was really fun to watch. But I do enjoy a good crushing every now and then.
This is something. If youâre a streamer and you get these tools, it should be easy to organize a competitive tournament among your community of viewers. Iâve tried that kind of thing in the past at a smaller scale. Could be fun.
Overwatch League Grannd Finals are starting right now.
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PUBG is my favorite game, but I never thought it a good fit as an esport. The normal format is a points based system which goes a bit like this:
- points for placement. So first place is worth more than second, and a sliding scale from there on.
- points for kills.
Then 16 teams play 10 matches, and the team with the most points overall wins the tournament.
This means that the best bet was to play aggressively, take fights to rack up the kill count, and then try and get inside the top 5 remaining at the end of each match. Winning was a nice bonus, but not always needed.
And then, at the end of the competition, teams would know that they needed to win or do well, but it was very confusing for viewers.
But now it has changed!
PUBG flew 32 teams to Taiwan, and after 2 weeks quarantine, they started up a 6 week competition. They need 16 teams for each weekend finals competition, where the prize money is decided, and they are leaning into the âsurvivalâ theme to do it.
The incentive is very, very simple:
- if you win a match, youâre into the weekend finals!
Thatâs it! They did pre-seeding rounds, and then had a list of the top 16 teams. Then there are 16 rounds, and the winners go through. The 17th team in the seeding is then brought in to make up the numbers, and it keeps going.
This means all of the qualifying rounds are intense! There is less aggressive play early in the matches, but the later sections are way clearer. Kills donât matter, you just need to get the win.
It also means that many of the top 16 teams, who had 16 chances to win, didnât make it into the weekend finals. And some teams in the bottom 16 seeds came in and won after just two matches, leapfrogging over nominally âbetterâ teams as decided by the normal placement-plus-kills metric.
Overall the drama is higher, and the incentives of the teams lines up with how normal players typically approach the game.
The only downside is the team I was most interested in, due to me watching one of the members as a twitch streamer, won the first qualifying match, so then isnât involved until the weekend finals. Thankfully he recast the streams with his own commentary, along with others in the room, and that was an extra layer of enjoyment on top.
https://liquipedia.net/pubg/PUBG_Global_Invitational.S/2021/Weekly_Survival/Week_1-3
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I want to give this a try as Iâve found all BR eSports hard to follow by being to big and too many teams. Iâve clicked around and canât find it - could you share YouTube or Twitch link?
That is a vastly superior PUBG competitive format. Good to hear it.
Itâs just Twitch forward slash pubg
They do one PUBG match per hour, so thereâs always a 15 minute break in between. The number of teams is a bit of a hurdle, but the casters do a good job of cutting to the action.
Iâm sure a lot of the enjoyment comes from already knowing the maps locations and the data on screen, but that barrier to entry is pretty fundamental to esports. Most esports are very data-rich compared to athletic sports, where the field/pitch is small and you can see most of the action all at once.
The closest sport that comes to esports is golf, where there are different people at different points in their story in different places, and you need to have their own individual scores up on screen to know what youâre watching and why itâs important. And then often see the overall leaderboard for more context.
With esports you often have all that information on the screen all the time, as well as the action the director wants to see.
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Will give it a try thanks. I played PUBG until Karakin map release and like it so should enjoy this.
This is why I still think Counter Strike is the best eSport as itâs easy to pick up smallish maps/player count and unlike DOTA âman go shootâ is easier to recognise than random spell buff effect shenanigans.
I am still honestly fascinated by the meteoric rise of MOBAs specifically as the largest and most successful esports.
They have confusing heuristics. They require significant knowledge to even follow. The material skills are largely invisible to spectators (timing hits, frame-level kiting, etcâŚ). They are difficult to get good at, but have a loooooong plateau of micro-improvements that require massive effort to achieve. Theyâre a perfect storm on what shouldnât have been the first truly big thing.
And yet they are.
I have pet theories, but itâs a topic that will require a lot of long-term research.